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Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works and Twitter Does Not

Small Firms Say LinkedIn Works, Twitter Doesn't - WSJ.com: "Many owners, including Ken Lopez of Washington, who started using social media to market his consulting business in 2011, tend to think the "value" of social media comes primarily from measurable factors, such as pageviews, click-throughs or direct sales. "We will tweet 10-plus times a day, and we will put roughly the same number of posts on LinkedIn per day, yet we get dramatically different results," says Mr. Lopez, whose A2L Consulting offers services to law firms. Two days every week for the past two years, he has focused on driving traffic to his website using LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And the work has paid off. He says A2L now gets 12,000 website visitors a month, up from 800 in 2011, and his Web-driven revenue has increased fivefold. But A2L gets little traffic on its site from Twitter, compared with other social-media outlets. "LinkedIn is the dominant traffic driver," says Mr. Lopez. "Twitter is a small percentage by comparison." Richard Alfonsi, Twitter's vice president of global online sales, says Twitter needs to do more to educate small businesses on the benefits of using its service to reach potential customers and on the most effective ways to use the service. . . . "